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Tolstoy in Context
  • Tolstoy in Context
  • Edited by Anna A. Berman
  • Published online: 05 January 2023
  • Print publication: 22 December 2022
  • View description
    Likened to a second Tsar in Russia and attaining prophet-like status around the globe, Tolstoy made an impact on literature and the arts, religion, philosophy, and politics. His novels and stories both responded to and helped to reshape the European and Russian literary traditions. His non-fiction incensed readers and drew a massive following, making Tolstoy an important religious force as well as a stubborn polemicist in many fields. Through his involvement with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, his aid in relocating the Doukhobors to Canada, his correspondence with American abolitionists and his polemics with scientists in the periodical press, Tolstoy engaged a vast array of national and international contexts of his time in his life and thought. This volume introduces those contexts and situates Tolstoy—the man and the writer—in the rich and tumultuous period in which his intellectual and creative output came to fruition.
  • Chapter 15 - The Family
  • from Part II - Russian Social and Political Contexts
  • Edited by Anna A. Berman, University of Cambridge
  • Book: Tolstoy in Context
  • Published online: 05 January 2023
  • Print publication: 22 December 2022, pp 119-126
  • View extract

    Summary

    As Russia went through an age of great reforms during Tolstoy’s adult years, relations between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and extended kin all evolved to match their changing society and its ideals. While Tolstoy was well aware of the debates about the state of the Russian family that raged at mid-century, his critique of the family talked past that of many of his contemporaries to focus on the moral issues closest to his heart. By mid-century many people considered the Russian family to be a backward institution based on patriarchal tyranny. Jurists struggled to rewrite imperial family law, while figures across the political spectrum debated the “Woman Question.” Tolstoy’s views evolved along different lines. He went from idealizing the traditional patriarchal family (through the 1860s), to acknowledging its flaws (1870s), to rejecting the family as an ultimate life goal (1880s onward). His ultimate ideal left no place for sexual love and was based on impersonal service to a higher cause. Ignoring all the quotidian realities of actually belonging to a real family made of real people, Tolstoy infuriated his wife with his abstract talk of living for the soul, while she managed the household and oversaw their large family.

  • Competing Visions of Love and Brotherhood: Rewriting War and Peace for the Soviet Opera Stage
  • Anna A. Berman
  • Journal: Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / November 2014
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2014, pp. 215-238
  • Print publication: November 2014
  • View abstract

    When Sergei Prokofiev chose to adapt War and Peace for the Soviet opera stage in the 1940s, he faced both operatic conventions and Soviet ideological demands that ran counter to the philosophy and structure of Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece. Prokofiev’s early decision to split his opera into Peace and War, making the first a romantic love story of individuals and the second a collective story of the people’s love for Mother Russia, marked a major divergence from Tolstoy. This article explores how Prokofiev reworked Tolstoy’s philosophy of love and human connection to make his opera acceptable for the Soviet stage. Moving away from Tolstoy’s family ideal in Peace, with its basis on intimate sibling bonds, Prokofiev shifted the family to War, turning it into a national Russian family of Father Kutuzov, Mother Russia and their children – the Russian people. The opera uses choral glorification of these heroic parents to foster on a national scale the type of intimacy Tolstoy had advocated in the home.

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